I am definitely not reading Tricky's post as humerous and ironic, but as a quite harsh accusation of fraud and I'm 99,99% sure I'm right on the money about that....
@ Tricky; wow, the first thing I thought after reading your post was; 'what a sore looser', but you get your fair share of (gold) medals so that can not be it (or you think you should get only gold medals?!). The second thing I thought about was a dutch saying that goes; "zoals de waard is vertrouwt hij zijn gasten".
A smart man wouldn't probably react at all to such a post but I'm just not smart like that. So for your viewing pleasure here comes the explanation!
I had some time on the 3rd of october so I was pleased to see the post of Civ_steve. But when I couldn't download the save file I posted a short message (what, imo, was not a complaint). At the time AlanH solved the problem my time for GOTM was burned that day. I actually played a bit on the 5th (all the way through 1725 BC to be exact (I still have the saves on my computer so I checked it!), than lost interest in GOTM for a solid 6 weeks. Picked it up again on the 22nd and 23rd of november, played a couple of hours on both days. Left it again for a week and then all of a sudden we were only a few days away from the final submission date and I decided I DID want to submit this game (mainly because I just enjoyed this GOTM but also because I didn't submit COTM 93 and didn't want to have 2 non submits in a row (kind of s up your ranking doesn't it
). So I picked it up again on the 30th, the 1st and finally finishing it 2:30 in the morning of the 3rd (weird thing; the GOTM site says I submitted on the 1st but I'm very sure I did on the 3rd (and have the e-mail to back it up!).... Crazy stuff!!!!!).
So 2 summarize it; your second explantion (the sarcastic one) was pretty close 2 the truth!!!
Damn, that's a very boring story. With my sincere apologies to everyone (ofcourse -/- Tricky
).
As for the thing of time played. I think that's about 2 things;
1) I think you most likely micro manage a lot more than me with the purpose of getting as high a score as possible. That takes time! Why I think this is because I almost always get the fastest time medal but regularly you still have a higher score than me (so you do better on happiness and terrain stuff which can be accomplished by better micro management than me). Props 2 you for accomplishing that feed.
2) I always close the game if I'm not playing. I'm pretty sure a lot of you don't do that (for example the 140 hours Paperbeetle had on COTM92! I hope that was not the net time spend on the game!)
Some quick other note;
you say "most of the times, you submit mere hours before the deadline". That was definitely the case with GOTM 122 and COTM92 but in case of the 3 submits before those; I made them a total of 6 weeks prior to the deadline.
I hope this explanation makes you happy! Finally I would like to thank you for saying that I manage to achieve stunningly brilliant victories. I also think you're a great player with very creative ways to solve the stuff that Civ_steve throws at us in the games. I personally hope we can still have a lot of battles for the gold medal (you know, with me playing open (big irritation of yours isn't it?) and you hopefully also playing open). Great competition makes victory just a lot sweeter!
Ciao
